


you'll believe god is a woman

by SomeEnchantedEve



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Apocalypse, American Horror Story: Coven
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Love/Hate, Obsession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 12:45:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16810885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomeEnchantedEve/pseuds/SomeEnchantedEve
Summary: 'After the bombs had fallen, Michael had known in his bones that somehow, she had survived it. He’s certain he would have known if she had died, would have felt her life force snuff out like a flame. Instead when he closes his eyes at night, he can hear the steady thrum of her heartbeat echoing in his ears, the soft hush-rush of her breath as she slumbers somewhere far away, waiting to awaken again. Behind his eyelids, he can still see her, framed against the blinding desert sun with her umbrella like a dark halo above her head, like an angel of death wreaking havoc across his life, beautiful and terrible.When he wakes, he can feel the thud of her pulse beneath his skin, like a constant companion, an ever-present reminder of his purpose. If he was sent to end the world in fire, it was Cordelia Goode who lit the match.'--"Michael is drawn to very strong women. [...] Michael loves Cordelia as much as he loathes her. He needs her." - Cody Fern, 'The Hollywood Reporter'





	you'll believe god is a woman

**Author's Note:**

> I blame Cody Fern and inked_bad_wolf and her fanart for this.

_“What is it?”_  
_“A powerful presence.”_  
_“What do you mean? Everyone’s dead.”_  
_“Not anymore.”_

Ms. Mead looks perplexed, but that’s to be expected, as she gathers her wits about her. He can’t expect her to know everything, to remember everything, right off the bat. Michael, on the other hand, is not confused – if anything, he’s _pleased_. Finally, things may become interesting. 

Oh, certainly he’s been enjoying toying with the occupants of the outpost like a lion may play with its food before devouring it, but in the end, they all break too easily. They are so desperate – for survival, for approval, winding easily around his fingertips in hopes of salvation. In hopes of _sanctuary._ Their neediness had been sickening, and the amusement he gathered from them short-lived. The names and faces may change from outpost to outpost, but the people do not. They are all alike, all easy to fool, all so terribly disappointing. 

_(Though when you are searching for one in particular, perhaps everyone else is bound to be a disappointment from the start…)_

As for Outpost 3, Gallant by far had been the easiest to trick, the most desperate and pliable, as easy to move as though he were made of clay. Venable, in all her prickliness, had been the only one to vaguely interest him; he thinks if he had not had his Ms. Mead suggest the poisoned apples, Venable may have very well come up with the idea on her own. He can appreciate a bit of a fight, but her own hubris had gotten her in the end. He had given her fair warning. 

No matter; it’s all been a holding pattern anyway. For eighteen months, he’s been waiting for Cordelia. 

He should have known from the moment that little surviving witch - _Mallory_ \- had surprised him with her fireplace trick, that it was only a matter of time, that it would be _soon._ He had counted on the apples serving as bait, and he had been right. Mallory’s magic would be like a homing beacon, a lighthouse in the dark, and drawn to it, to one of her poor girls in the most dire of danger, Cordelia would _(finally)_ come. 

After the bombs had fallen, Michael had known in his bones that somehow, she had survived it. He’s certain he would have known if she had died, would have felt her life force snuff out like a flame. Instead when he closes his eyes at night, he can hear the steady thrum of her heartbeat echoing in his ears, the soft _hush-rush_ of her breath as she slumbers somewhere far away, waiting to awaken again. Behind his eyelids, he can still see her, framed against the blinding desert sun with her umbrella like a dark halo above her head, like an angel of death wreaking havoc across his life, beautiful and terrible. Again and again in his dreams, he climbs the stairs of Miss Robichaux’s Academy and bursts into an empty room that still smells like her perfume. 

When he wakes, he can feel the thud of her pulse beneath his skin, like a constant companion, an ever-present reminder of his purpose. If he was sent to end the world in fire, it was Cordelia Goode who lit the match. 

When he finds her there at the base of the stairs, she’s already risen not just the witch Mallory, as he expected, but the voodoo queen Dinah and the insipid St. Pierre Vanderbilt girl, too. Curious choices, to say the least, but quick work nonetheless. Impressive, given that he can smell the weariness on her, the weakness, like the scent of a dying rose plucked too soon from the vine. She is _fading_ yet here she is to face him with iron in her eyes and steel in her spine, despite knowing that even at the greatest heights of her power, she would never be able to match him. She’s a fool, but a brave fool. He can admire that, at least. There are worse ways to die than bravely. 

How different things might have been, had she never lit that pyre and taken away the one person he loved most, the one person in the entire world he trusted. In another universe, they should have been allies, not sworn enemies. From the moment she stepped into the Hawthorne School, her council following in her wake like obedient ducklings, he had known she was different, was _better_ than the grasping warlocks with their magic that amounted to little more than party tricks. That was why they hated her so, because they _feared_ her, because she was powerful and they were weak. And he had shown her that he, too, was powerful, that he was like her – not like them. 

There is far too much bad blood since that day, and Cordelia’s lips curl into a mocking smile when he offers safety, salvation, a place at the table in exchange for fealty. Standing apart from Cordelia and her precious girls, Dinah moves before him to make a big show of bowing her head and prostrating herself, but Michael pays her no mind – the offer was never meant for her. She is everything he despises most in the world. She has served her purpose to him and he is finished with her now. The offer was only ever meant for Cordelia, and he knew it would be refused – perhaps that is why he offered it in the first place. The last eighteen months have shown him time and time again that humanity is a lost cause, fueled by greed and cowardice and above all, the need to survive, but it is much more fun when they don’t bite the apple the first time it is offered. 

Everyone will bend and break eventually, of that he is certain, but they didn’t have to make it so damnably _easy_ all the time. When Dinah is felled by Marie Laveau, he can’t help but smile faintly before nodding to Ms. Mead. He had enjoyed watching them squabble amongst themselves, settle old scores, but he’s waited long enough and it’s time to eliminate the extra distractions. 

But Cordelia, it seems, is better prepared than the silly witches under her at the academy, who had fallen so quickly to Ms. Mead before the bombs had dropped, better prepared than the warlocks who had put up even less of a fight, laughable in their feeble attempts to stop him. With the murmur of a spell, suddenly his Ms. Mead is sputtering and sparking beside him, her arm falling useless to her side. With a powerful blast, she flies apart, and he is thrown from the stairs with the force of the explosion, landing hard on his back. 

Next to him is the head of the robot he had taken such care to preserve, broken from the rest of her body. Despite knowing that she can’t feel pain, he can’t help the rush of guilt that washes over him, that she should suffer again because of him, the one person in the world he had never wanted to bring hurt, ever. 

_No,_ he reminds himself, not because of him – because of Cordelia, always because of Cordelia. 

“Ms. Mead?” he whispers, and he feels his eyes sting as he touches the face he had constructed after the woman who had loved him so well. The pain is a dull ache, nothing like the piercing agony of seeing her burnt remains, and tears come more for the reminder of that day than the loss of this substitute. In his heart, he had known this Ms. Mead would never replace the one had lost, that she was merely created to placate him. He could make another. But it reminds him keenly how no matter what he makes, they will be a pale imitation of the woman he seeks to replace. 

She is gone, and now this replacement is gone, and Cordelia is once again the architect of it all. Only she knows the way to cut him to the quick, how best to hurt him. When he thinks himself impenetrable she seems to find the weak underside and slips her dagger in to make him bleed. 

“Sorry about your toy,” he hears the witch Madison say, and she raises Mead’s broken arm at him. Madison, the girl he brought back, who chose Cordelia anyway. The _losing_ side. They all had, all the witches he had brought back in a bid to show his power, and in a childish desire to prove himself to her. Without a second thought or a backwards glance they had returned to her side, their beloved, revered _Supreme_. 

It’s a sort of loyalty the warlocks could have never hoped to secure. Even Michael himself, he can reluctantly admit, doesn’t inspire such devotion. He has countless followers, some bought and some devout, but they follow him because he is his Father’s son. His grandmother had loved the boy, but loathed the Anti-Christ. Only his dear Ms. Mead had loved both, had embraced Michael in his totality, and even she, he must wonder in his darker hours…if another boy had been chosen by his Father, would she had loved him still? Would she have mothered him with such tender care if she didn’t whole-heartedly believe in his purpose? 

But Cordelia…her coven, they follow her for herself, not simply because she is Supreme. They _love_ her, they _choose_ her, their leader and protector. She can’t save them now, but they still don’t waver. _She likes to pretend she is fair and she is nowhere near as brazen in her power as her mother,_ Ariel had warned him, a lifetime ago. _But in her own way, she is far more dangerous than Fiona ever was._

Ariel hadn’t truly known, though. He had plotted and schemed and hoped for his precious Alpha, and had never understood the way Cordelia Goode crawls beneath the skin, a magic that can’t be learned in books. For over eighteen months, Michael has longed to cut her from his veins where she ran like a poison. 

Madison fires, and the smell of burnt flesh fills Michael’s nostrils as he flies back and hits the wall. It’s painful, even if he knows it’s temporary, and his last thoughts before the world goes black is that he’ll be sure to kill her first. 

When he awakens again, the witches save Madison are gone. She is still holding Ms. Mead’s arm, but her back is turned, distracted, and it is all too easy to dispense of her with a simple wave of his hand. Dipping his fingers into the spill of her blood, he sees a memory – _I’ll hold him off as long as I can, go, go_ and he watches through her eyes as the witches hurry to the stairs, ushering the little witch Mallory ahead of them. Halfway up, Cordelia pauses and looks back at Michael’s body slumped against the wall, her face uneasy. 

Michael draws his hand back from Madison’s body and raises his eyes to the stairs, as though expecting to still see her there. She isn’t far, he can tell, and now she’s panicked. Whatever she had planned, it’s gone awry, and she’s grasping for what to do now. The thought of her distressed, spiraling, is as sweet as he always hoped it would be, and though part of him wants to run, he takes the stairs slowly instead, savoring the moment of his impending victory over her. 

With each step, he can feel his powers growing, stretching, multiplying. Voodoo, witches…they are nothing compared to the power of his Father, to all the powers of hell that are now all his. Marie Laveau expects her little voodoo spell to halt him in his tracks, and he can’t resist the opportunity to reach through her barrier and rip out her heart in front of her. And for the St. Pierre Vanderbilt girl – of course she would be a witch of no consequence and no power – he barely needs to flick his finger to destroy her, and even that is expending more energy than she deserves. The knife she had driven into his back is little more than the irritation of a bug bite, and with a small grimace he pulls it out. 

He turns, and there, framed in the doorway at the end of the hall with her back to him, still as a painting, is Cordelia alone. Just the two of them, the way it is meant to be, the way it was that day so long ago, when she had offered her hand and a chance at a different life. A different future. 

And there had been a part of him then that had wanted to take her hand and leave it all behind, wanted to fall into the softness and sweetness and love that she gave to her coven, to those under her charge. She had been so lovely and earnest in that moment that he could almost forget what she had taken from him, and what he was, what his destiny was. She had told him she saw humanity in him, and in his weakness, he had wanted to believe. Brought to his lowest moment, he had wanted her to save him, had thought perhaps she was the only one who could. 

But when he had slipped his hand into hers to stand, he saw her standing there as his Ms. Mead burned and proclaimed her faith in him with her dying breath. He couldn’t betray Ms. Mead, not when she had given him everything, had been the only one to love him for who he was – for all that he is. He had to avenge her. 

He had been weak, then, but now he is strong. Cordelia has taken everything from him, and now he won’t rest until he has taken everything – absolutely everything – from her in turn. He’ll cut her to pieces and scatter her to the wind and maybe then he’ll finally be free of her. 

And now it is just the two of them alone, the Anti-Christ and the Supreme. With her back to him, it would be so easy to finish her without her even knowing he had approached in the first place. He could dispatch of her as easily as her precious girls, as she weakens and he grows stronger. 

But no – there would be no satisfaction in striking with her back turned. He wants to look into her eyes, wants her to look back when he kills her. He wants her to know that she’s dying, and that it – and the destruction of everything she has ever loved, of the entire world – is her fault. 

“How did you think this would end? Prophecy is inevitable.” She whirls to face him, and her eyes are dark with unshed tears, her face damp. For some reason, he had not expected her to cry, despite seeing her tears when he brought her students back to her. It’s a beautiful sight, one that he plans to see time and time again before he is finished with her. “I was always going to win…Miss Supreme.” 

She disagrees, as he knew she would. Despite every sign to the contrary, despite the world is ruins around her, she still thinks there is a _chance_. She still has hope, despite the fact that she is only still breathing because he wills it so, for now. He lets her give her grandiose speech, and when she holds out her hand and the knife he had still been absent-mindedly holding flies from his grasp to hers, he lets her have it. 

He isn’t sure why he gives her such a measure of dignity in the end. Perhaps it reminds him a bit of when he lived alone in the house, and would play chess with Ben, and Michael would let him make a good move before swooping in for the victory. Winning is always sweeter when your opponent thinks they have a chance. Cordelia has seen him rise from a spray of bullets, and she is not nearly as stupid as the St. Pierre Vanderbilt girl to think that a knife would save her now, would even buy her very much time at all. And he has no need of it himself. He certainly isn’t planning on killing her with anything as impersonal as a knife, not when he’s had nearly two years to imagine so many slower, more intimate deaths. He wants to take her heart between his hands and crush it to dust, he wants to wrap his fingers around her throat and squeeze while her nails rake his skin in a bid for freedom. 

He wants it to be close, and exquisite. He wants to make her cry again. 

But not now, not yet. He isn’t ready yet, not when it seems crueler still to make her live to see the ruins of her failure. Her allies are all dead or nearly so, except for the old woman with the wild red hair. It’s fitting that she should be last, Cordelia’s closest confidante. He’ll be sure to kill her slowly before burning her soul while Cordelia watches, and maybe then she would finally understand what it is to be all alone in the world, to lose the most important person in the world to her. Perhaps then she would realize what she had done to him, once she has finally lost everything and everyone, once she has finally lost the last measure of _hope_ that she speaks about. 

His pulse quickens at the thought, a smile spreading across his face even as she speaks. Despite her tears, she is still proud and defiant and he imagines she will be that way until the very end, no matter how low he brings her. She would never grovel the way Dinah had sniveled to save her skin while abandoning her son, giving up all semblance of dignity in the end. 

She raises the blade, and he watches with heavy-lidded amusement to see what she will do. Should she try and use it against him, he doubts it will even sting this time. But he doesn’t expect – somehow he never thought – what she chooses next, and with a bright flash glinting through the dimness, she plunges the knife deep into her own heart. 

He freezes, his eyes wide and his mouth agape as she lets out a shuddering gasp of pain, while her fingers run red with blood. Behind him, the old witch screams, a long agonized cry of heartbreak that he can barely hear over the buzzing in his ears as Cordelia meets his eyes and slowly, shakenly, she _smiles_. 

_Why would she do that,_ he thinks, almost numbly – after so much time spent with the humans left after the earth had been cleansed, the one thing he is certain of is that people will put their self-survival above anything and everything. The instinct runs deep, primal, and therefore had been so easy to exploit. He had expected Cordelia to fight him every inch along the path towards her death, battling for her life despite losing everything else. But she is different. Again, she is different; again, she surprises him and hurts him where he is most weak. 

His fingers twitch, and he wonders if it would be better to call the blade back or leave it where it is, which would be less damaging. There may still be time yet, and he doesn’t stop to think about the absurdity of wanting to save her so that he may kill her later. He isn’t ready; once he thought it would be enough to see her die, but not if she doesn’t _know_ what she did to him, doesn’t _understand_ , doesn’t feel his hand rip out her heart and know that he’s finally won, that he was always destined to win. She has to realize he has defeated her, she can’t _choose_ , she can’t grasp her own fate between her hands and take it for herself. 

He had waited, so long and so patiently. He’d combed the world, stalking from outpost to outpost, searching for her and leaving destruction and death in his wake. Everything he’s done, he has done with the desire to ruin her in mind; that day in the desert she had taken everything but given him a purpose, given him a drive. He was destined to destroy the world, destined to destroy _her_ , and she’s taken that from him, the way she’s taken everything from him until all that remained was her. 

She is the only one left, and now she has taken that from him, too. 

And before he can decide what to do, she steps back, still with that smile on her face, and she falls from the staircase. Instinctively, he yelps, rushing forward, but when he reaches out, he is left with only air in his grasp, as though she were a ghost and he is still dreaming. Without even a scream, only the quiet flap of her cloak, she is gone, as quickly and unexpectedly as his grandmother, as his Ms. Mead, as everyone in Michael’s life who ever mattered, and he is alone. 

Again, he is alone. 

He peers over the landing and she is framed at the bottom in candlelight, her long blonde hair spread like a halo around her head. Sickeningly slow, the pool of blood around her spreads like a creeping growth, until all he can see is red. Her eyes are half-lidded, unseeing, and he can’t bring himself to look away from her face, still and calm. _Victorious._

_You will see me die, but you won’t find it satisfying,_ she had warned him. 

Perhaps it never would have been.


End file.
